Dr Zoe Laughlin, creative director of the new Institute of Making at
University College, London, wants us to get a feel for real objects again,
she tells Jane Shilling.

Recently I visited an exhibition by a distinguishedartistwhose organisers urged us to access a specially created website on our smartphones while going around the show. The resulting spectacle was bizarre: the crowd gazing intently at their phones while the pictures languished unregarded on the walls.

Like it or not, the side-effect of living in a world rich in virtual experience is a weakening of our relationship with stuff. But Dr Zoe Laughlin, creative director of the new Institute of Making at University College, London, wants to change all that.

As a child, Laughlin used to fill her pockets with found objects. She grew up to become a co-founder of the Institute – a resource bank of materials both ancient and almost inconceivably modern.

Our connection with objects is more fragile than we think. Forty years ago, I was half-fascinated, half-terrified by the regular visits of our grimy coalman. But the passing of the mining industry has almost erased the memory of coal as a mineral hewn from the earth, and now Laughlin finds that visitors to the Institute are “almost affronted to see a piece of coal the size of a flat-screen television”.

Then there is aerogel, a glass foam developed by Nasa to gather stardust. As ethereal as coal is elemental, it is 99.8 per cent air, refracts light so as to appear sky blue and is as insubstantial as an object can be – “a sort of solid poem”, says Laughlin.